Linda Mahood, Thumbing a Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018), 172, 202-3.
“Hey! Did you hear about the
hitchhiker who got stuck so long in Wawa he got married?”
“He got what?”
“He got married. He waited there a
month and then he got married to a chick he met the second week he was there.”
– “The legend of the Wawa hitchhiker,” heard in 1971 in a
youth hostel in Kamloops, British Columbia, and retold in numerous interviews
***
In 1972 the Canadian rock band
Crowbar captured the living folklore of life on the road in its song “Tits Up
on the Pavement,” which is a dirge about the blues of hitchhiking in Wawa,
northern Ontario: “Anytime you go across this country, you have to go through
Wawa, Ontario. Cars are going by at 85 miles an hour with nobody in ‘em. The
longer you stand there, the longer your hair gets. The longer your hair gets,
the less your chance of getting a ride.”[167] Today, Wawa residents still tell “horror
stories” about the “big headache” caused by “thousands and thousands” of
hitchhikers stranded for days, weeks, and months on the outskirts of town.[168]
Soldiers stationed with Wawa’s 49th Field Regiment used to put hitchhikers in
army trucks and drive them “off to Sudbury.”[169] Tall tales of thumbers
stranded in Wawa passed from hitchhiker to hitchhiker and across the Atlantic
Ocean. A Canadian in Europe said, “People asked me if it was true.”[170] The
longevity of these stories about Wawa hitchhikers was not solely due to Wawa’s
position on the shore of Lake Superior, which made getting a ride around it “notoriously”
difficult, but also due to their status as urban legends, the telling of which
was an essential part of the pleasure of travel, communitas, performance, and
play.
167. Crowbar, “Tits Up on the Pavement,”
on the album Larger Than Life
(Daffodil Records, 1972).
168. Wawa is often looked on as
the watershed of cross-country travel and is notorious as the place to get
marooned. “Army of Hitch-Hikers Already on the March,” Winnipeg Free Press, June 22, 1972.
169. Interviewee 23b, Erin,
Ontario, March 7, 2013.
170. Interviewees 34a and 34b,
Toronto, April 8, 2013.
=====
Jake Anderson, “HITCHHIKER WAITS TWO YEARS FOR RIDE!”
Weekly World News, 4 April 2005, p. 55.
When it comes to hitching a ride, Freddy Turner is all
thumbs. The 27-year-old traveler has been waiting for a lift for two years! This
sucks, man," Turner says from the same spot where he's stuck his thumb out
every morning for the last 741 days. "But I have a feeling today's my
day." Turner's been saying that every day since a truck driver dropped him
off in Wane, Canada, a small town smack dab in the middle of the country. "There's
really nothing for about 400 miles either way," Turner says. Turner says that
because it's in the middle of nowhere, Wane is known to be an impossible place
to hitchhike from, and that he wouldn't have taken the ride if he knew he'd get
dropped off there. [...]
[In this piece of tabloid fiction, Wane is obviously a stand-in for Wawa.]
======
Jake Williams, “The World Capital of Hitch-hiking Stories,” Folklore Frontiers #2 (1986), 2.
